Safelincs Fire Safety Products is typical of the kind of business that has thrived in the era of mobile communications. Safelincs, the UK’s largest online fire safety company, uses technology to reach and stay in touch with customers throughout the UK and beyond.

Recently, the Safelincs team has started to use TextMagic's SMS gateway API to stay in touch with customers. But the firm isn't taking the traditional SMS marketing route. Instead, it is using text messaging as part of a free reminder service. Safelincs' IT Manager explains:

"As well as being a profit-making business, Safelincs is also strongly ethical – we have a real commitment to saving people’s lives through fire safety. We support the Government’s Fire Kills campaign, and we do a great deal to keep people aware and informed of fire safety issues.

"As a part of that strand of the business, we’ve recently set up a free SMS reminder service for customers who want to keep their smoke alarms and carbon monoxide detectors working. All they have to do is sign up on the website, and we send them a reminder when they need to test their alarms, replace batteries and so on."

The  Safelincs team has used the TextMagic SMS gateway API to integrate text messaging into the company website. Customers fill out a simple form, stating their mobile number and the type of reminder they require. The API handles the rest.

How difficult did the developers find it to integrate the TextMagic SMS gateway API and get started with automated text messaging?

"Not difficult at all. We’d been keen to integrate SMS into the site for a while, and we spent some time shopping around different service providers. We settled on TextMagic because it seemed to offer a flexible API and the best combination of service, reliability and pricing.

"Integrating with the API was very easy indeed. We had one small glitch which was resolved really quickly, and we managed to get the service up, running and tested without even buying any SMS credits – the 20 free credits we received on sign up were enough to test the whole thing."

And would Safelincs recommend TextMagic to other businesses?

"Definitely. Integrating SMS into a website sounds like it needs a lot of complex work, but it didn’t at all – I think it wound up taking a day’s development time and some very standard coding skills. We’ve had no problems whatsoever, and we hope to be using TextMagic to text our subscribers for a long time to come."

Interested in how automated text messages can help your business? Learn more about out SMS gateway API.

TextMagic released its API in May 2009. This new product provides a way to SMS enable applications and software. We provide two ways to connect to our Bulk SMS Gateway. In addition to Email to SMS you can now connect using HTTP interface.

HTTP API includes the following features:

1. Send SMS: bulk, single, Unicode
2. Receive SMS
3. Get delivery status for all messages sent

For HTTP API we are planning to build wrapper classes for the following programming languages:

1. Java
2. PHP
3. Ruby
4. Python
5. C#/.Net

Find our more about our API:
API information page
API manual for developers